never the same

Tag Archives: gender

I’ve been catching hell at work lately. The last week and 1/2 have been SO way better. But there’s no telling how my review is going to go next month. Let me explain.

No, there is too much – let me sum up.

I’ve been working on a project for over a year. One specific test [Fe content] will not work. The method isn’t complicated, it just doesn’t work. I’ve had other people try it, and they’ve gotten the same results that I got. I’ve gotten pointers and suggestions – nothing helps. My boss has been content to let me spin my wheels, until the end of last year. There wasn’t much in the way of support from her. She applied more pressure as time went by, coming up to most recently saying that I need to stop “messing around”. [Like I enjoy working on something and failing every single day. Oh and getting yelled at every day. In front of my coworkers.]

I planned to visit NYC to see my sister, and got my vaca approved in Feb. Later my boss said I wouldn’t be able to go unless the project was completed. Finally, she took this test away and gave it to someone else – along with way more support than she’d ever given me.

I can go on my trip [I leave tomorrow after work], I’m getting way more done [I have 3 other projects at work, besides this], but because she took the project from me, my review will most likely be really crappy. My only consolation is that the test isn’t working any better for my coworker than it was for me.

I haven’t needed a vaca this bad since last year when my boss was being awful. But I am SO glad to be going.

I’ll be seeing a few shows and eating phenomenal food and having a great time – cuz I need it.

One more day of work – and then I’m R-U-N-N-O-F-T. For a few days, anyway.

Maybe sometime I’ll delve into the reasons that whenever I mention issues with my boss, people make comments about her being a woman, as though her erratic/mean behavior is connected to her two X chromosomes. Or they posit that it’s a hormonal issue. AAAAAAAAAAAACK! Yes, she’s bizarre and randomly heinous, but I don’t think it’s linked to gender, people.

Tonight, Private Practice peripherally touched on the intersex issue. An intersex baby is born, and the parents choose to have a gender assignment surgery. [Of course, Addison, who always makes the right decision – for other people, shows them the light in her refusal to do the surgery.]

The day the Joneses brought their baby home, lots of friends and relatives came over to see it. None of them knew about the secret Xperiment, though. So the first thing they asked was what kind of a baby X was. When the Joneses smiled and said, “It’s an X!” nobody knew what to say. They couldn’t say, “Look at her cute little dimples!” And they couldn’t say, “Look at his husky little biceps!” And they couldn’t even say just plain “kitchy-coo.” In fact, they all thought the Joneses were playing some kind of rude joke.

But, of course, the Joneses were not joking. “It’s an X” was absolutely all they would say. And that made the friends and relatives very angry. The relatives all felt embarrassed about having an X in the family. “People will think there’s something wrong with it!” some of them whispered. “There is something wrong with it!” others whispered back.

“Nonsense!” the Joneses told them all cheerfully. “What could possibly be wrong with this perfectly adorable X?”

Nobody could answer that, except Baby X, who had just finished its bottle. Baby X’s answer was a loud, satisfied burp.

I’m cool with Obama. I think he’s a nice guy. And it’s all good, as far as that goes. I do think he’s more of a politician than he’s getting credit for – come on, anyone who can talk to me for 30 min – not say much of anything – and still have me end up wanting to have his baby? that’s a good politician.

But I said I’d decided to vote for Hillary – and I did. [it was actually really awesome to vote for a woman for president – as I think it would’ve been to vote for a black man.] To bring it down to brass tacks, I think she’d represent me better – and that’s what I want. My voice/view represented.

I don’t find a whole lot of difference between the two candidates. But Obama has kinda got me wondering about his loyalty to the party – his platform stance on ‘hands across the aisle’ has me wondering how he’s gonna get that to work. I really do think Hillary’s against the war, and will work to get us out of Iraq. I think she got caught up with a lot of other people at the outset and said some things that continue to haunt her in regard to the war.

I hate that the media’s blowing every interaction between the two of them up into some kind of skirmish…but I get it. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with either one of them. But the picture I’m getting, as the dominoes fall, is that there are a fair amount of white people who are congratulating themselves on backing Barack instead of Hillary. White people who are quite comfortable using euphemisms to say that they think Barack is ‘white-enough‘. [At least, they’re comfortable saying it around me, and I understand – they know I know it’s a euphemism, but I don’t feel like making work into a hostile environment – and they think I’m white-enough, too.] So I make an edgy comment here or there, to let them know it’s not ok to take it so far as to tell me something we couldn’t come back from [I’ll fill this space with an example when I’m not so tired].

But yeah – I’m getting that there are quite a few people [some of whom are racist] who have decided that a black man, is still a man – and that distinction is enough to make him the better choice. I don’t see that as so much progress for racial issues in America. Just a setback – or maybe more of a reality check – for the gender issues we’ve got.

Of course, we can’t rule out the folks that actually, actively HATE Hillary. [There is a lot of that here, where I live. Women and men alike vilify her.] And I just don’t get why they are so angry. I know people who’ve hated her since Bill’s first term – for having the audacity to be more than a[n] (inanimate) fixture in the White House. People who hate her for staying with Bill through the whole ‘Monica-gate’ thing. Aack! Stop hatin!

So, I feel like Hillary would be more loyal to my concerns, but I can’t tell for sure. Not with anyone. I like Obama, too. I like his honesty. His seeming transparency. He looks like he prizes his integrity, and I think that he’s probably felt some of the push we all feel – to live to a higher standard because we’re “examples” for our race. [Boy is that some pressure]

So maybe this post feels like I’m waffling. Maybe I am. I’d kinda like Hillary to win it all this year – I don’t know when there’ll be another viable female candidate for the job. But if Obama wins the nomination, I’m for him with both hands – and both feet, too.

The thing I don’t want is for this nit-picking, drama-baiting thing to continue. It doesn’t make anyone look good.

I happen to love Ciao Bella passion fruit sorbetto – a lot, a lot. But I have refrained recently cuz it’s just too cold to be having ice cream/sorbet.

I’m in the mind of having some, as I’m in the midst of the whirlwind of planning/co-planning a long overdue trip to Rome. My sister and I were actually supposed to go last year, and we could just never get our schedules to mesh. She’s in school and has much more freedom than the ball-and-chain that my 5-day/week grind has turned out to be. [This 5day a week crap with 2 weeks of vaca a year – it bites.] Anyway – we’re still a tad bit undecided between March and May cuz the prices in May are astoundingly outrageous in comparison to those in March.

Initially, my sister had concerns about the temperature in March, but the longer I think about it – the more I realize that my best clothes are long-sleeved anyway. [That is so feminist of me, right? eh. I wanna look good.] Continue reading →